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One of the beauties of liturgy
One of the things that may confound some folks who wonder about me leaving the Pentecostal denomination I grew up in is how I go to a place that has liturgy. I mean, it “repeats” every Sunday! Where is the moving of the Spirit? (Of course, no one actually asks me these things. Silence is the code these days.)
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We need the true prophetic voice again
“The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived and what counts in life. Over and over again, God the Holy Spirit uses the prophets to separate his people from the cultures in which they live and to put them back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all…
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Dwelling with the Shepherd even in the Shadows
Psalm 23 “Our lives are lived in the company of both the Shepherd and the shadow.” — Eugene Peterson
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The way of holiness
“But holiness is in wild and furious opposition to all such banality and blandness. We are introduced to it through the stories of the burning bush in Milan, the mountain on fire at Sinai, the smoke- and angel-filled temple in Jerusalem. We find ourselves in the presence of God alive, with life far in excess of anything we imagined. This…
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I long for the Word Incarnate
“Too often the living Word made flesh is desiccated into propositional corpses and then sorted into exegetical specimens in bottles of formaldehyde. We end up with god-talk. T.S. Eliot put it like this: Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word…Where is the Life we have lost in living?— Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch…
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Freedom, religion, control
“Egypt was a thoroughly religious society, and Egypt was a thoroughgoing slave society. If you want to control a person or family or society, there is no better way than through religion. And that is just as true today as it was in ancient Egypt.” — Eugene Peter, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
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We seem to like having enemies
I am re-reading Eugene Peterson’s As Kingfishers Catch Fire. He helps me to reimagine the work of preaching. He reminds me that we have done a fine job of taking apart a text historically, grammatically, and textually. We’ve also done a poor job learning from the text.
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The congruent life
“The Christian life is the lifelong practice of attending to the details of congruence — congruence between ends and means, congruence between what we do and the way we do it, congruence between what is written in Scripture and our living out what is written, congruence between a ship and its prow, congruence between preaching and living, congruence between the…
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We have lost imagination in ministry
I have no sense of imagination. I will miss Eugene Peterson. Peterson saw pastors moving from church to church, often in exhaustion, and identified the problem—a sense of pastor as program director for a church that often viewed the gospel as a way to success, or at least avoidance of suffering. His answer was a paradigm shift, but not the…
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Another spiritual giant transitions to glory
Spiritual giants are in transition. Dallas Willard a few years ago. Today, Eugene Peterson.
Tag: Eugene Peterson
